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Worried About Applicants Abandoning Your Job Application?

Are you worried About Applicants Abandoning Your Job Application?
In the spirit of our series on capturing as much talent from the best sources as possible, this week we’ll pause to cover a trap that many savvy businesses fall into. This comes up a lot - a worried employer is nearly convinced that applicants are abandoning their job applications before submitting them and that’s the reason they don’t have the talent flow they need. This conclusion usually comes with a basket full of bad ideas on how to address the imagined root cause.

The conventional wisdom of HR who are pretty familiar with ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) and know how bad they can be to use for applicants (which can be a real issue) reflexively think first about ease of use for the applicants and good Operators who need to hire pressure HR, their support, to just “fix it”.

Accessing big pools of great talent – for Free, part 2

This Post is part of a series on practices to capture more of the best talent and leverage tools to avoid having to resort to Job Posting and the worst sources of applicants. The previous parts are here:

Businesses with multiple locations, multi-unit operators, have a particular advantage in attracting and hiring great people when they implement effective “Pooling”.

Pooling means the efficient sharing of applicants across locations. Here’s a scenario that comes up often: Location 1 attracts a high number of applicants while nearby locations 2 and 3 get nothing. Without pooling, the Location 1 business is very successful because they have access to a flow of the best talent who perform better when hired. Unfortunately, locations 2 and 3 are forced into spending money on postings and job boards like Craigslist. So they tend to hire from the worst sources of talent which ripples through the business; a drag on customer satisfaction, productivity and profits.

Accessing big pools of great talent – for Free

We’ve spent some time in the last blog posts discussing the value and importance of great hiring to employers, and the sources of great versus bad hires. Last week we discussed the basic business practices to attract and capture talent from the best sources to drive hiring needs. To summarize, be a good place to work, spread the word you’re always looking for great people, eliminate any roadblocks for applicants and definitely rev up your referral programs. And when there isn’t a sufficient enough pool of applicants from great sources when businesses need to hire - using job boards can ruin your week with a deluge of low quality applicants.

This article is about 2 best practices that build on top of the programs we discussed in our last post. These techniques are about amplification; Leveraging your existing best practices of capturing talent from the best sources and using automation to increase the available talent pool at any time.

4 Ways to avoid using job boards such as Craigslist

If you read last week’s article about avoiding bad hires you know the first and best step to avoid making a bad hire is to avoid the sources of bad hires such as want ads and job postings.

I’ve not met a single person who enjoys having to post jobs on Craigslist or some other board, and then has to sift through the applicants. But everyone also knows they need a large pool of applicants to be able to find a find an acceptable hire. The problem is most businesses don’t have enough applicant flow from the best sources for all of their hiring needs, so they resort to job boards.

Avoiding Bad Hires

In the first part of this article, we provided some background theory and examples of what some employers do. Now we’ll describe the specific sources that provide the best applicants.

The reasons are common sense and are validated by studies. Past employees know exactly what they’re getting into and want to come back (and you have their performance history) Referrals, in the natural course of recommending a friend do their own environmental fit evaluation and job preview for their friend or relative and are making screening decisions based on that fit before referring. Community and customer referrals are slightly weaker in terms of outcome but still of very high quality.